The world wide web (www) is quickly emerging as a standard for information publishing, and it is a rich source of timely information. One of the key features of this form of information is the inclusion of hyperlinks in information messages received from a website using the "HTML" (hyper text markup language), that are commonly presented on a sophisticated display screen in a www browser window (such as Netscape Navigator.TM., distributed by Netscape Communications Corp., Mountain View, Calif., and Internet Explorer, distributed by Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash.), as underlined text. These hyperlinks indicate that information related to the under-lined topic can be retrieved by selecting the underlined word or words in the browser. This hyperlink is actually a link to another website, and is indicated in the protocol of the HTML, hyper text transport protocol (http), by "tags", and includes text that indicates the hyperlink. For example, the following information is a portion of a message which includes a hyperlink, as viewed in a typical browser:
. . claimed that he was `innocent` of any wrongdoing in the Whitewater affair . . . . PA1 . . claimed that he was `innocent` of any wrongdoing in the &lt;A HREF="http://www.whitewater.com"&gt; Whitewater &lt;/A&gt;affair . . . .
The information in this example was sent to the browser in HTML protocol as:
In this example, a leading and trailing anchor (A) tag (each of which comprises the &lt;&gt;symbols and the characters between them) delineate the text "Whitewater" that identifies the anchor (hyperlink). The hyperlink address, or more properly the uniform resource locator (url) of the hyperlink, is the "http://www.whitewater.com" located within the leading anchor tag. It is this text, that indicates the existence of a hyperlink to a user, that is underlined by the browser program when presented by the www browser window. Browsers often present the underlined text in a color different than other text, as well as underlining it. It will be appreciated that underlining and changing the color of the text are techniques that involve changing displayable attributes of the characters. The entire sequence of characters in the hyperlink, including the two anchor tags and the text between them, is called an HTML element.
Because a customer demand exists for access to the information available on the world wide web as well as other information networks, the use of hyperlinks by communication devices in most communication systems is an aspect that is highly desirable. However, a problem exists in phasing in the use of hyperlinks in existing communication systems that have communication devices that lack an ability to decode a hyperlink, such as pagers already in use in many paging systems. In this sense, decoding a hyperlink means a) locating the hyperlink in the message, b) removing the tags, uniform resource locator, and anything else other than the text that identifies the hypertext link (so as to not confuse a user), and c) marking the text that identifies the hyperlink. Newer communication devices may be equipped to decode hyperlinks, but what is needed is a technique that provides identification of a hyperlink in a communication system that includes communication devices that do not have a function for decoding a hyperlink.